That's far more than the 782,000 or so retweets for the previous record holder — the 2012 "four more years" photo of President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama hugging.

Ellen's twitpic is also being credited with "breaking" Twitter for a short time. According to The Associated Press, "Twitter sent out an apology because all of the retweeting disrupted service for more than 20 minutes after 10 p.m. ET."

Bloomberg News says that's not necessarily bad news for Twitter. The temporary disruption, it notes, brought the microblogging site "tons of publicity."

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got into the spirit with a tweet of its own: "Sorry, our bad."